want to acknowledge doug of the senior economic analyst at 9 advisory company -- at my advisory company who did the numbers crunching for this, which is a capacity of mine that has become very rusty. my interest in the issue of what is really happening to the incomes of americans really began in 1988. i was running economic policy in the michael dukakis campaign, and he was making the statement comparing the median income in 1988 and the median income that some significant point in the past, whether it was 10 years or 15 years, and he said the incomes of the american people have stagnated. i went to him, and i said in know, that is really not correct. the median has stagnated, but the incomes of the actual people, as people age, they move from below the median to above the median. you're never really capturing the experience. i spoke to political people, and i said people know their incomes did not stagnate over the last eight years, so when they hear the governor say that, and i tried to make it a political point, which is the way economists get listened to in campaigns, they're going
